CKAN vs. DKAN

[Carl V. Lewis]

Hi there!

I'm currently working as a Code for America brigade captain to help the CIty of Savannah build an open data portal. I was wondering if anyone here has experience using the Drupal distribution DKAN? If so, how would you compare it to CKAN? Main reason for considering DKAN right now is that it will make it easy for city employees to maintain.

Let me know.

Thanks!

[Steven De Costa]

Hi Carl,

I guess the main thing to say is that DKAN is not a distribution of CKAN. A bunch of people get confused on that point.

The main benefit of CKAN is the data specific community of developers and users surrounding it. The 200+ extensions work only for CKAN and target data management more so than web experience management.

It is relatively simple to use CKAN + Drupal in the same stack, which provides the benefit of using any Drupal distro , theme and modules while keeping the Data catalogue component purely focused on data management. 

GovCMS, the Drupal distro, has some interesting modules being developed to work alongside CKAN. There is also CKAN extensions to support single sign on.

For an example you can take a look at data.wearecbr.com.au/data which is a data catalogue based on CKAN. This data drives the web experience found at data.wearecbr.com.au, which is all Drupal :)

Within Drupal we simplified the user experience for uploading and viewing data but kept the power of CKAN available for ETL and post processing of data. This made it easy to provide an S3 uploader and more recently to script AWS Rekognition to markup every image asset with AI generated tagging.

Image harvesting from Twitter and Flickr is done via CKAN too :)

Although that data catalogue is only used for images and videos currently, we are building a Connector for TRIM and will soon have a PoC for public records/documents to support a proactive FOI use case. These word/PDF files will be discoverable via API in CKAN and we'll build an additional UI in Drupal to support the public discovery of FOI records.

So, my preference is using CKAN as a data catalogue and using Drupal, WordPress, SiteCore, etc to enable mashable web experiences to aid with information domain specific discovery. City employees with interest in service delivery/reporting maintain the web experience while information management specialists and data custodians maintain the CKAN data catalogue as a shared service.

Cheers,

Steven

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[Andrew Hoppin]

Hi Carl, slightly belated reply, apologies— I agree w/ most of what Steven said, and there are many good examples of Drupal + CKAN mashups, but I would say that the community question can cut both ways— CKAN has a larger data-specific developer community to be sure, and if your use case is mostly about open data portals it’s a great way to go.  

But if your use case is more about engagement, communications, or other outcomes that are best delivered by CMS functionality, and backed by properly managed open data, then the simpler path (and largest relevant developer community) may be on the DKAN side— because it’s “just Drupal,” and thus has a large talent base already inside governments worldwide, as you alluded to in your post.  

You can check out more about the DKAN-specific community here: http://getdkan.com, and of course CKAN’s here: https://ckan.org/developers/.  

Best,

Andrew 

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From: ckan-global...@googlegroups.com <ckan-global...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Steven De Costa <steven....@linkdigital.com.au>
Sent: Friday, February 3, 2017 6:48:41 PM
To: ckan-global...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [ckan-global-user-group] CKAN vs. DKAN

 

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ckan-global-user-group/CAMp%3DOsYKAnYomSRL3ukH%2BhmmCEKYTTHOBJV6R%2BU9HKO8qjoTbw%40mail.gmail.com.